


free my heart with a kiss

by knightinbrightfeathers



Series: got a feeling most would treasure [1]
Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fairy Tale, As you do, Bees, Claustrophobia, F/M, Fairy Tale Elements, Greek Mythology - Freeform, M/M, Magical Artifacts, Multi, Polyamory, True Love's Kiss, gansey dies and comes back, no ronan in this one but i promise he'll show up
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-14
Updated: 2016-08-14
Packaged: 2018-08-08 18:24:52
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,099
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7768411
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/knightinbrightfeathers/pseuds/knightinbrightfeathers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>One day, Blue finds a boy living all alone in a tower in the middle of the woods.</p>
            </blockquote>





	free my heart with a kiss

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Jasmine Thompson's "Ain't Nobody".

Once upon a time was a city, which is not important; and by the city was a forest, which is not important; and in the forest was a tower, and in this tower lived a boy, who is not important quite yet. This boy lived without a mother or father, although he had both. He had food and water, books and games, clothing and all that he could need besides, but he was very lonely.

If the tower had been closer to the city, perhaps someone would have come to investigate the soft crying sounds that sometimes came from its windows. As it was, only the trees heard the boy cry, and what they told one another no-one in that region understood. There was a family of witches who lived where the forest met the city, and sometimes they would say to one another, “The forest is very sad today,” but they were too far away to hear the boy’s sobs, and that was that.

One day, the daughter of one of the witches grew restless and would not apply herself to anything useful, or even anything useless. She bothered her aunts and snapped at her cousins until her mother sent her out of the house. Not quite knowing what to do with her wandersome feet, the girl went to visit her father, deep in the forest.

Usually he had stories to tell her of his youthful travels, before he put down roots, but that day he had nothing but the sighing of his branches to give her.

“The tower is sad again,” he told her, with his face drooping towards the ground and his toes digging into the dirt. “The tower is sad.”

“What tower?” asked the girl. “What do you mean?”

Her father, who was of a nervous constitution, only pointed a slow finger. This sapped him of energy, and he sank back into his tree.

The girl shook her head in disgust at her mother's’ terrible taste in men and walked in the direction her father had showed her. The forest became darker and darker around her, thicker and thornier, so that her hair caught in the brush and burrs stuck to her sleeves. Just as she was thinking of turning back, the undergrowth abruptly ended. A little ways ahead was a clearing, and in the clearing was a tower. This, thought the girl, must be the tower her father had spoken of, and if so it might be alive, and should be approached with care.

“Although,” she murmured, “it doesn’t _look_ sad.” It reminded her of someone who had just gotten comfortable in their armchair, with their quilt tucked around them and their tea just within reach, and had no intention of getting up just to deal with someone else’s messes.

She strode up to the tower, cupped her hands around her mouth, and called, “Hello!”

A startled, excited sort of sound came from the tower, and an undoubtedly human head, followed by undoubtedly human shoulders, popped out of the window. Looks could be deceiving, but nothing eldritch would ever wear that shade of eye-searing yellow.

“Hello!” said the person in the tower. They grinned brightly and waved both hands at her as if they were a strange wingless dragonfly trying to take flight. “Are you a wood sprite?”

The girl felt all her good will shrivel up and fall at her feet. “I should think not!”

“Perhaps a dryad, then?” asked the stranger, squinting at her. “Or- well, you’re a bit _short_ for a hulder-”

“Hulder!” the girl said, incensed. She crossed her arms and glared up at the tower window. “D’you think you’re in Norway?”

“No, of course not. It’s just that I haven’t seen anyone around here in a long time.”

“How long a time?” asked the girl.

The stranger in the tower shrugged. “I wasn’t tall enough to see out of this window,” they said, and suddenly the girl saw why her father had called the tower sad.

“For the record,” she said, uncrossing her arms, “the proper term for a person who lives in a tree is tree-light.”

“Oh,” said the stranger. “Doesn't that get confusing?”

“What does?” asked the girl, ready for a new bout of rudeness.

“Calling someone by their home,” said the stranger. “I mean, you might as well call me Tower Boy!”

“I might as well,” agreed the girl, “since I don't know your name.”

The boy frowned. “That's quite rude of me. My name is Gansey.”

“Just Gansey?” asked the girl.

“That's all there is. Actually,” the boy said, scratching his head, “it's Richard Gansey the Third, but that's a very long handle for one's self.”

“Well, Gansey,” said the girl, “my name is Blue.”

“It's a pleasure to make your acquaintance, Blue. Would you like to come up for tea? Is that a thing people do? I have an etiquette book here somewhere, but it's ancient. There are parasols in it.”

“I'd love to have tea,” said Blue. “Where are the stairs?”

It turned out that there were no stairs. Instead, Blue climbed up a ladder that Gansey dangled out of the window, blessing the bark in her veins that she had no fear of heights.

When she tumbled through the little window, the first thing she saw was the much bigger window straight across the room.

“I could have climbed through that!” she told Gansey.

Gansey looked sheepish. “I forgot it was there,” he said. “But I knew you'd fit.”

Blue stared up at him, not sure whether to say something sharp or just climb straight out of the window, away from this strange boy. Then she burst into laughter. Before long Gansey was laughing too. They sank against each other, melting into a pointy-elbowed puddle on the floor.

When they'd calmed down, Gansey beamed at her. “I'm glad that the ladder held up. I’ve never tested it before.”

Blue smacked him on the shoulder. “Don't push it.”

+

From then on, they were friends. Blue made a point of visiting twice a week at least, and her mother, who believed in giving Blue room to branch out, made sure that she could.

“But be careful,” Maura said. “You know that-”

“I know,” Blue said.

+

Once, she asked Gansey, “How do you get food in here? And water for bathing? You must wash. You don't smell bad.” She blushed. (Not because she was embarrassed, Blue told herself, but because he might take it the wrong way.)

That was when Gansey showed her the silvery-pink pot, which bubbled in the fireplace and never emptied, and almost always produced something with potatoes in it, and the arrangement of clay pipes that drew water from an underground well into a basin when he spun a rusty old wheel. There were a lot of things like the pipes in the tower, which Gansey had told her had once belonged to a witch called Gwenllian, clever fanciful things, but nonetheless the kind of magic that simply consisted of being smart and resourceful. The pot, however, was entirely different.

“There's a few other things just like it in here,” Gansey told her, pressing a little hourglass in which the sand flew up instead of down into her hand. It wasn't like the pot, not at all, but she knew what he meant.

Gansey claimed that Gwenllian’s journals spoke of a thing called the Greywarren, which could bring these things from another world, but when Blue tried to read one such journal the looping, spiteful logic of it made her head hurt.

“Let's do something else,” she said, shutting the journal with the unsettling feeling that Gwenllian was crowing in triumph at her. “Why don't we go outside? It's so hot, and there's a pond not far from here.”

“I can't swim,” Gansey said.

“You could wade in the shallow part,” Blue said. “Come on, Gansey. You're whiter than teeth. Some sun will do you good.”

“I can't,” Gansey said. “I can't leave.” He lifted a hand, and Blue pressed her palm to his, fitting her fingers between his. “But you should go. You can tell me about it.”

“Don't be a twit,” Blue said. “I can go any other day.”

Gansey's grin bloomed beautiful across his face, despite his best efforts to keep it a respectable size. “You're the best _homo arbus sapiens_ I've ever met, Blue.”

Blue, who by now was used to Gansey's little bursts of scholarly nonsense, withdrew her hand and fell back against the stone of the tower wall, desperate for something to cool her down. “I'm the _only_ half-tree person you've ever met.”

+

About the same time Gansey decided to just leave the ladder hanging from the window (the bigger one), Blue decided to bring bits of the outside to him. Living with a curse had taught her that nobody ever wanted to be asked about theirs, so she refrained from questioning Gansey about the exact details of his confinement. Still, just because she didn't know precisely why he was trapped against his will in an old witch's tower didn't mean she couldn't make his imprisonment more bearable.

It had to be against his will. No one who had any choice would choose to be as sad as Gansey was.

Carrying a skirtful of blackberries or fresh eggs up a rope ladder proved impossible, so Blue's appearance was generally preceded by a basket. Her head followed, and the rest of her torso, until she was straddling the window ledge. And there she stayed, sharing the ledge with a young mint plant, because this time, Gansey was not alone. Sitting beside him on the great wooden trunk was another boy.

They looked at her. She looked at them.

Blue broke the tableau by pointing accusingly at the boy. “I know you! You're Henry Cheng!”

“And you're Blue Sargent,” Henry said.

“I didn't know that your last name was Sargent,” Gansey said.

Blue whirled on him. “It doesn't matter! What did you let the merchant boy in here for? He could…” _set off your curse._ “...be dangerous.”

“Oh, no, Henry's fine,” Gansey said brightly.

Blue threw up her hands at such naiveté. “Oh, he’s fine! How did he even find this place?”

“I followed you,” Henry said.

“No you didn't,” Blue said firmly. “I would have noticed.”

“You were carrying a bird's nest. Perhaps you were distracted?”

But Henry's gallantry was wasted on Blue. “That was three weeks ago! When were you going to tell me, Gansey?”

Gansey looked miserable. “I wanted to.”

“I asked him not to tell,” Henry said, rising. “You see, when I say I followed you, I don't mean _I_ followed you.” He brought a closed fist to his mouth and blew into it. When his fingers uncurled, Blue saw that a bee rested in the center of his palm.

“You're a _thriae,_ ” Blue said.

Henry nodded. “A very lonely _thriae_. We come in threes, you know. I've become accustomed to sending out a bee or two to search. Imagine my surprise when I found this tower, and inside it a boy that asked me to please not sting him, because it would hurt the both of us.”

Gansey blushed. “I wanted to tell you, Blue, but it wasn't my secret to keep.”

“I suppose it wasn't,” Blue said. “All right, truce.” She reached out a hand to shake, and Henry's bee flew away and into his mouth again.

Any other girl would have been taken aback, but Blue had seen her mother tell the future and her father grow lichen. They shook.

+

Despite Blue’s initial misgivings, she and Henry soon grew to be fast friends. He had a way of disarming her prickliness by acquiescing to it. He seemed to understand why she would want armor around her heart. Besides, he had a sense of humor.

“What are you doing?” Blue asked Gansey, who had leapt to his feet.

“One stands up when a lady enters the room,” Gansey answered, a sure sign that he’d been let at the etiquette book again. He nudged Henry with a foot. “Right?”

Henry’s face showed his opinion of Gansey’s etiquette book.

“Well, I’m not a lady,” Blue said, sliding into the room and landing on her feet with a thump. “Ladies don’t climb through windows. I’m-” She hesitated, searching for a term that wouldn’t sound horrible. “I’m a not-lady, that’s what I am.”

“The very opposite of a lady,” Henry agreed. “So we should stay seated!” He pulled Gansey down to the floor and dropped down next to him, grinning up at Blue. “And now we’re all the same height, too.”

“I save my growing for better things,” Blue said loftily.

+

It became a game between the three of them, the boys shuffling around on the floor while Blue towered above them.

The most invested of the three was, of course, Gansey. Having nothing else to occupy his time, he threw himself into this new game with all the energy of a much younger child. With every visit, there would be something new- a skyscape carved into the baseboard, or an unnecessarily complicated system which would drop a cup into a pair of waiting hands with just the roll of a marble. Blue would inevitably find herself hoisted on Gansey’s shoulders, trying to attach a pinwheel to the ceiling or scrape a failed experiment off the plaster, while Henry handed up the putty knife with one hand and covered Gansey’s eyes with the other, his own eyes firmly screwed shut.

If it made Blue feel private and complicated things to see the boys on their knees before her, she kept it to herself. Sometimes you had to take what you could get.

+

Both Blue and Henry were very curious people. It takes a certain kind of person to search out a tower in the middle of a forest and then to befriend the boy living inside it. However, they’d led very different lives, and so asked very different questions. Blue would ask, “What’s so fascinating about Welsh mythology?” or “Don’t those pipes ever crack?” or “Is there a problem with my trousers, Gansey? Then why are you looking at them like that?”

Henry would ask, “What’s this?”

He’d peeled back a section of threadbare rug after claiming that there was something beneath it that was killing his knees. Now, the rug was shoved aside to reveal a pair of big iron hinges and an ornate iron handle.

Blue came to peer at it. “I think it’s a trapdoor, Cheng.”

“Thank you for pointing out the flaw in my question, Sargent. What I meant to say was: Why did we not know of this trapdoor?”

“And what’s inside?” Blue added.

They looked at Gansey, who had gone pale.

“You can’t go down there, it’s rusted shut,” he said, and it was.

“It’s easy enough to clear up,” Blue said, who often adopted abandoned knickknacks. “Lemon and salt should do the trick.”

“Or vinegar,” said Henry, whose various tutors had once included a ‘rescuer’ of valuable and ancient artefacts.

“There’s nothing down there,” Gansey said, so unconvincingly that Blue almost left well enough alone. “Besides, it’s dark in there. And it’s cramped and full of cobwebs.”

Henry shivered. As a bee, he disliked spiders. As a boy, he disliked dark, cramped spaces. And as a friend, he disliked the fear in Gansey’s eyes. “Sounds like you’ve been down there. Even though it’s rusted shut.”

“What’s down there?” Blue asked gently.

Gansey didn’t want to say.

+

A few days later, when the smell of vinegar filled the tower room, Gansey still didn’t want to say. But he helped Blue and Henry scrub off the rust anyways, and with all three pulling together, the trapdoor screeched open. The rope ladder was tossed down, the trapdoor anchored open, and the descent made.

It was dim, but sunlight came in through the open trapdoor. There were cobwebs, but they were abandoned. And it wasn’t cramped at all. There were broken down chairs and empty jars and roofing tiles in the corners, but the wooden floor of Gansey’s tower room made a high ceiling.

In one corner lay a skeleton, slumped in an awkward position and still dressed in its blue sweater. Beside it, arranged stiffly on an overworked chaise lounge, was Gansey, very much dead.

+

Once upon a time there was a boy who went on a trip with his parents. The boy’s parents were very busy people, and the boy was very well-behaved and often very quiet, so no-one noticed when he slipped away to find someone to play with.

The boy and his parents were staying at a manor house with an enormous garden, on the opposite side of the forest to where the Sargents, and later the Chengs, lived. There were no children around, so the boy amused himself by criticizing the statuary. This soon grew dull, so the boy wandered away from the clipped and cultured part of the garden and into the wilder part where it merged with the forest. The deeper he went into the woods, the more things there were to see. He didn’t mind that the briars were tearing holes in his expensive shirt, because the squirrels running up and down tree trunks were much more interesting. Everything was a novelty, from the bird throwing down insults to the red toadstools.

The wasp that stung him was a novelty, too, but one that the boy would have preferred to go without. The wasp stung him again, and soon there were more wasps, and the boy was left with only pain.

A cool hand grasped his wrist, and the boy stumbled away from the wasp nest he had inadvertently disturbed, blindly following his rescuer.

“Come on, you have to squeeze through, the door’s nearly overgrown,” he heard dimly. So the boy clambered through a narrow gap and fell onto a couch.

“Let me help him,” he heard before he fell unconscious. “I’ll trade you, a life for a life, that’s fair, right? Mine for his. I know it isn’t really a life, but you can keep him like me if he stays here, right? He isn’t even dead yet! Please, he’s just a kid…”

The boy drifted in and out of consciousness. Being awake was a struggle, but he was stubborn, and he lived. Pain greeted him whenever he opened his eyes, but so did a boyish face, with an odd smudge on one cheek and a sad solemnity in his eyes.

When he finally woke, his body free of the wasps’ poison, that same face was still there, grinning from ear to ear.

“Thank you for taking care of me,” said the boy, sitting up shakily. “My name’s Richard Gansey the Third.”

“Czerny. Noah Czerny,” said Gansey’s savior. He looked to be about eighteen years old, although he was dressed in the fashions of the previous decade. “You’re welcome.”

Gansey looked around the room. “Is this your house?” he asked, good breeding warring with fascinated revulsion.

“Kind of.” Noah got to his feet and helped Gansey off the couch, steadying him when he stumbled. “Careful there.”

Gansey nodded, looked back at the couch, and nearly fainted again. A mirror version of himself lay there with its eyes closed.

“Weird, huh?” Noah asked softly. He pointed at the ground behind the couch, where a skeleton in a sweater identical to Noah’s own slumped with half its face caved in. “That’s me. It was me, I mean. I was already dead when the guy who killed me dragged me here. This place keeps you alive, though.”

“Will I stay ten years old forever?” Gansey asked softly.

“Nah,” Noah said doubtfully. “You look like a grower to me.” He frowned, then brightened. “Come on, let’s go upstairs. It’s great up there.”

He helped Gansey climb up the rickety ladder, shouting encouragement all the way up. When Gansey was standing on the wooden floor of the room upstairs, the trapdoor slammed shut. Noah simply climbed through it.

“Oh,” he said, looking down at himself. “I think I’m leaving.”

“Wait,” Gansey cried. But Noah was already gone.

+

“I've stayed here since,” Gansey said. “If my parents sent out search parties, they never got this far. It's probably for the best. If they had found me, I would have gone with them. I would have died. It's not a bad life, you know.”

They were back in the top floor of the tower. Gansey was sitting on the trapdoor, as if trying to keep his extremely dead body out of the conversation as well as out of the room.

“You can't leave the tower, Gansey-boy,” Henry said finally.

“It's better than nothing,” Gansey said. “Better than a painful death.”

“That's not living,” Blue said gently. “That's just existing.”

“So you'll stay here, living in fear, until you die?” Henry had gone green. “Alone in this tower?”

“I'm not alone,” Gansey said. When Henry shook his head, Gansey hastened to correct himself. “I would never ask either of you to stay here with me, of course.”

“Don’t be stupid,” Blue said sharply. “We’re here because we want to be.”

Henry wrapped an arm around Blue’s shoulders. “What if one of us falls sick, or dies in an accident? What if we quarrel? What if we just die of old age, and you never die in here?”

“What would you have me do?” Gansey asked, pushing wild hands through his hair. “It's certain death. I'll take uncertain immortality over certain death any day.”

“I wouldn't,” Henry said, shuddering.

“Even if it hurt?” Gansey looked very young, and frightened. “I still remember how it felt, Henry. If I'm a coward for not wanting that, then I'm a coward.”

“Have you tried? Have you taken just one step out of your prison in all these years?” Blue asked.

Both boys looked at her. She'd started crying in silence sometime during their argument, and the tears were still wet on her cheeks.

Gansey took her hands, leaving a bird's nest on his head. “Blue…”

“Answer me,” she said hoarsely.

“No.” Gansey bowed his head. “I can't.”

“Is it the pain you're afraid of, or the death?” Blue asked. Gansey pulled his hands away. “Because - because you're already dead. You are,” she cried when he rose to his feet and started pacing. She got to her feet and stood there, shaking. “You're dead, Gansey.”

“Don't say that!” Gansey’s hands returned to his hair.

“I can help with the pain. I'm cursed, did you know that? If I kiss my true love, he'll die, that's my curse. It won't hurt. I asked every fortune teller and soothsayer, every palm and tea leaves and Tarot reader. It'll be painless and quick. And - Henry, I haven't known you long enough, I think, but Gansey, I love you. I can give you this.”

Gansey came over to her. “Why would you do that?”

“You can move on. Stop being a solid ghost.” Blue wiped angrily at her freshly wet cheeks. “You don't have to. I wish you wouldn't. But I know you should.”

“You can live with fear if you're happy, Dick,” Henry said softly. “But it isn’t worth it otherwise.”

Gansey’s jaw worked, but he did not speak. Instead, he pulled Blue into his arms, letting her dry her tears on his shirt. “Give me time,” he said, meeting Henry’s eyes over her shoulder.

Henry nodded and rose to wrap his arms around them both, until the buzzing in his stomach dried all of their tears.

+

A week later, they stood in the middle of Gansey’s tower room. It was a strange funeral, with the sun shining outside and Blue and Gansey holding hands, facing each other as if they were to be wed.

“Did you know that bees can tell when someone's died?” Gansey asked.

Henry nodded. “I knew.”

“Will you be able to tell?” Gansey whispered.

Henry just shrugged, face twisted up miserably.

Blue took a deep breath. “Last chance, Henry.”

“It should be you,” Henry said.

“Should nothing,” Blue said.

Henry didn’t look at Gansey because he was already looking at him, hadn’t stopped since he climbed through the window. But he did give Gansey a bright smile, a normal-day smile. “What do you say, Number Three?”

Gansey let go of one of Blue’s hands and reached out to Henry, cupping his cheek.

“Please,” he said, although it didn’t need to be said.

It was a perfect first kiss, quintessential but for the death lying beneath their feet. When they broke apart, Henry was breathless and Gansey was smiling faintly, looking awestruck, and Blue felt guilty, a little for Henry’s heartbreak and a little for the thrill in the pit of her stomach.

“Nice,” Henry said.

Gansey pressed his forehead to Henry’s collarbone. “You already knew, didn’t you.”

“I realized when we opened the trapdoor,” Henry said. “The bees never even thought of stinging you, and they try to sting everyone at some point. Nothing personal, just bees being bees. But they didn’t see you as a threat.”

“All right,” Gansey said, breathing in deeply. He straightened up and took Blue’s hand again. “All right.”

“Ready?” Blue asked.

Gansey nodded. “Kiss me, Blue Sargent.”

She kissed him. It was a tiny kiss, and it didn’t seem to Blue powerful enough to do anything. A magical kiss should have sparks and lift you up to float midair and make light pour from your every orifice. Instead, when their lips parted, Gansey fell.

At first his weight pulled Blue down, making her stumble, but then he was gone and Blue was on the floor, her hands and knees throbbing from the fall.

“It wasn’t even a good kiss,” Blue said. She felt distant. Perhaps she was floating, and the wooden floor under her was far away. She rubbed a thumb against the grain of the floorboards to make sure, and the world rushed back. She was still in the tower, and Gansey was dead. She was crying.

“God,” Blue said, sitting back and covering her mouth, as if holstering a gun. A bee landed on her thigh. The room was full of bees, and that was dangerous, because Gansey-

Gansey was gone.

“That can’t be right,” Henry murmured. He tilted his head, as if he was listening to something. Bees crawled in and out of his ears. “That doesn’t make sense.”

Then he opened his mouth and the bees all streamed in. “Blue,” Henry said, strangely high-pitched. He coughed. “We have to open the trapdoor.”

“Why?”

Henry looked at her, his hand already poised over the handle. “Gansey’s down there.”

“Can’t it wait?”

“No, because he’s alive!”

+

Being dead hurt. It hurt quite a lot. It was unfair, Gansey thought, that Blue had gone to all this trouble so that he wouldn’t feel pain, and in the end it still hurt.

He started walking. Or maybe he had already been walking. Some part of him knew that it would hurt more if he stopped. He was on a road-

-in a kitchen, where someone who looked a lot like Blue cried into a pie dish-

-in a field, lushly green apart from a white scar in the earth-

-in a tomb with hieroglyphics carved into the walls-

-in a room, where a boy his age was bent over a bowl of inky water.

The boy looked up. “You’re not supposed to be here,” he said, but calmly, as if dead people accidentally walked in all the time.

“Excuse me,” Gansey said. “Where am I, exactly?”

“21 St. Agnes Street, Richmond, Virginia,” the boy said. “Although you’re actually on the corpse road.”

“That sounds unpleasant,” Gansey said.

“I imagine it is.” The boy peered at him. “You don’t look very dead.”

“I assure you, I am.”

_“Wake up. Wake up, damn it.”_

The boy shook his head decisively. “You’re going backwards. If you were dead or dying, you’d be going the other direction- are you all right?”

_“Maybe you should try again?”_

“Can you hear that?” Gansey asked thickly.

_“Do you want to kiss someone who’s been dead for ten years, Henry? Because let me tell you, dead men do not brush their teeth.”_

The boy rubbed his left ear. “I can, and I shouldn’t be able to.”

_“I wouldn’t dream of intruding.”_

The pain pulled Gansey forward-

_“No, no, I insist.”_

-a mountain covered in snow-

_More pain._

-a pyramid made of stairs-

_“Well, at least he’s still breathing.”_

-a bustling crossroads, and a cart going right through him-

-Gansey opened his eyes.

+

Epilogue

+

“How does it work?” Blue asked. She wiggled her toes in the grass. “Do you just step on it?”

“It’s not an automatic,” Henry said. “Mother wouldn’t let me take one of those. They’re all hundreds of years old, you know, and threadbare.”

“I like the color,” Gansey said. He wasn’t as pale as he had been in the tower, but he was thinner, the shadows under his eyes deeper.

Blue rolled her eyes. “You would.”

Even after a month of Maura’s healing teas and Persephone’s noxious ointments and Calla’s brutal exercises, Gansey’s body still forgot that it was alive sometimes. The only reason he was able to walk about, according to Calla, was because he had kept growing. Only time would tell how he healed.

Gansey being Gansey, he took all this within stride and kept up a cheerful demeanor. Only Blue and Henry were allowed to see him when he broke down.

Blue sat down in the middle of the carpet. “So do I say the magic words?”

“Up, up and away?” Gansey suggested.

“It’s a matter of intention,” Henry said. “Go ahead, Sarge.”

Blue closed her eyes. “ _Up_ ,” she said in the language of the trees, and the carpet rose until it was level with Henry’s waist.

Gansey clapped, cheering.

“Show off,” Henry said, smiling.

Blue opened her eyes and grinned at them. “Where shall we go?”

“Venezuela,” Henry said.

“Vietnam!”

“Virginia,” Gansey said.

“It definitely starts with a V, Rick, but aren’t you thinking a little small?” Henry swept the arm that wasn’t wrapped around Gansey’s waist in an expansive gesture. “It’s a magic carpet! We have the whole world at our fingertips!”

“Richmond, Virginia. 21 St. Agnes Street.”

“Why there?” Blue said, landing the carpet.

“There’s a person there I’d like to talk to,” Gansey said.

Blue and Henry exchanged a look.

“Well, I for one don’t see why we shouldn’t,” Henry said.

“Richmond, Virginia it is,” Blue agreed.

But they made a few detours on the way.

**Author's Note:**

> "Telling the bees" is an old custom (Wiki says it's European) in which bees were told about important events when they happened. They said that if you didn't tell the bees about a death in the household, they would know anyways and leave or die.  
> The thriai were a triad of bee nymphs in Greek mythology. Henry Cheng in this AU is a boy with a bee colony living inside of him. It's practically the same thing!  
> ...look, I'm just bluffing my way through this, okay? I mean, the working title for this was 'Ganseyboy, Ganseyboy, let down your hair'.  
> Edit: OK, so I just realized that I said at the beginning of the fic that no one in the region understands the language of the trees, and then at the end I had Blue talk to the carpet in that language. All will be explained! But just FYI, Blue has been spending a little time inside trees.


End file.
